With the increase in demand for broadband communications and services, telecommunication service providers are in a constant state of flux to provide the fastest and most reliable service to their customers. Not surprisingly, a vast interconnection of data networks has emerged to support these services. Any disruption in the communication paths between network nodes (e.g., routers) can result in packet loss, latency, or delay, causing slow service as well as intermittent interruptions of service to customers. Hence, in modern data communication networks, the network restoration speed is critically important to ensure that the customer applications are not impacted during any carrier network failures. In fact, network availability is often a part of the Service Level Agreement (SLA) between a carrier and its customers. For example, a common benchmark restoration speed is sub-50 ms; that is, the customer traffic should be re-routed within 50 ms of any network node or link failure. Traditional approaches have not been successful at achieving these restoration speeds, resulting in degraded or halted communication services. The development of new network recovery schemes has the additional challenge of maintaining compatibility and interoperability with existing protocols, as an overhaul of current mechanisms would be both expensive and limited in deployment.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach to network restoration that can satisfy requirements for rapid recovery and ensure interoperability with current protocols.